Typewriter fanatic is hailed a ‘hero’ by star Tom Hanks
HE loves typewriters so much that he once created a mobile phone app to mimic the clickety-clack of their keys.
So when Tom Hanks received a letter from a fellow collector, he wrote back – hailing the stunned Scottish bookseller as his ‘hero’ for helping keep the machines alive.
Tom Hodges, who owns Typewronger Books in Edinburgh, was floored when the Oscar-winner replied to his message.
He had written to the star earlier in the summer to let him know the National Museum of Scotland was running a typewriter exhibition – and to invite him to come and visit his shop.
Using his grandfather’s old Remington Noiseless, he had typed the Forrest Gump and Toy
Story actor a letter telling him all about his life – including his time living a Bohemian existence in a Paris bookshop.
Mr Hodges had been a so-called Tumbleweed in the city’s famous Shakespeare and Company shop, where he was allowed to lodge in return for volunteering as staff and teaching others to use and repair its ‘decrepit’ old typewriters.
When he finally returned home, he opened his own independent bookstore in Edinburgh.
And months after he wrote to the Holllywood legend, the 35year-old, pictured, was left speechless when a reply arrived this week.
Mr Hodges told BBC Scotland: ‘I had no idea it was from him.
Then inside it said, “Tom Hodges, you are my hero”, and I flipped to the bottom and there was Tom Hanks’s name!’ The star wrote using a SmithCorona Sterling typewriter on headed paper from the upcoming Elvis biopic directed by Baz Luhrmann, in which he stars as Colonel Tom Parker. Writing from the set of the film, Hanks said Mr Hodges’s life story ‘sounds like something out of Hemingway’, adding: ‘And now, you battle the giants to sell the best of books – and keep typewriters alive. Did I tell you that you are my hero?’ Hanks even x’d out the mistakes in his letter, rather than using Tipp-Ex – as every typewriter fanatic knows the liquid can mess with the mechanism. Oscar-winning Hanks owns more than 120 typewriters from across the world, dating from the 1930s to the 80s.
He always travels with one of his machines and is known to use one to reply to typewritten letters from fans. His hobby comes at a price. ‘A $5 typewriter from Australia that cost $85 to ship,’ he once revealed.
Mr Hodges, who has more than 100 of his own machines, was overjoyed to receive the letter, but not because of Hanks’s status as a famous Hollywood actor.
He said: ‘For me it’s all about his love of typewriters’.
Saying that he hopes Hanks will get to see the typewriter exhibition, Mr Hodges admitted it would be ‘lovely to meet him, he seems like a really wonderful man’.
‘I would want to talk to him about typewriters an awful lot!’